.hack//G.U.+ by Tatsuya Hamazaki and Yuzuka Morita

In 2017, the stakes in the MMORPG known as "The World" have gotten even higher with the appearance of PK's, or "Player Killers", who hang out at character spawning sites and kill new characters as they emerge, both for their equipment, and the sense of power it gives them.

However, the rise of PK's have seen the rise of another kind of player, the PKK, or "Player Killer Killers", who take on the PKs and keep the server safe for new players. Strangely enough, not everyone likes or approves of the PKK's, viewing it as merely the same sort of behavior.

One of the most famous or notorious of the PKK's is Haseo, who has picked up the nickname of "The Terror of Death". But Haseo isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He's seeking a PK known as Tri-Edge, because Tri-Edge killed the character of a friend of his named Shino. And the attack sent Shino into a coma, from which she has not recovered.

Haseo finally tracks down Tri-Edge, only to nearly be killed by him. Instead of being killed, Haseo is taken to a place called "Serpent of Lore", where he is approached by two game characters run by the managers of the server on which the game runs. They reveal that Haseo was attacked with something called a "Data Drain", which would have resulted in the death of his character if they had not saved him. There, they reveal that Tri-Edge is really an AIDA, an illegal error inside the game. Shino was not the only person Tri-Edge, whose real name is Azure Flame Kite, attacked, and all his victims are now in Comas. The Administrators call them "The Lost Ones".

Haseo is upset and refuses to listen to the administrators, leaving Serpent of Lore. He tries to imagine what really happened to Haseo, but is approached by the player he saved at the start of the story, Atoli. After trying to drive Atoli away, Haseo is befriended by the other player, who tells him it is the connection with the other people playing that keeps him in the world and makes him want to gain strength. Energized, Haseo returns to the System Administrators and agrees to work to find the AIDAs, but only because he wants to help his friend Shino.

He returns to Moon Tree, the town where he started, and notices one of Tri-Edge's signs. He approaches it and notices it is glowing. The sign teleports him to one of the Lost Grounds, where he is attacked by Bordeaux, one of the players he PKK'ed earlier. Now, however, she has increased her power, and attacks him in return. More to the point, her attacks actually hurt his real body. Just when she is about to kill him, another user shows up and saves him, using her Epitaph, a doll that data drains Bordeaux and takes her extra powers away from her.

The woman, known as "The Propogation" says that she is an Epitaph user, but so is Haseo. If he uses his Epitaph, he can take away the powers of people like Tri-Edge. The woman takes him to the battle Arena, where a PC named Endrance is fighting to defend his title from the previous holder. There, she tells him that not only is Endrance an Epitaph-user, he has also been infected by the AIDA PC. When Endrance defeats his challenger with one hit, using his Epitaph, Haseo challenges him to a fight. Only through fighting can his Epitaph be awakened, and he must awaken it to defeat Endrance.

In the fight, Endrance gets in a solid hit on Hawseo, nearly killing him, but Haseo's Epitaph awakens, and now it is a fight between Epitaphs! Can Haseo win, or will he become just another Lost One after his defeat?

I find the .hack series to be very... unbelievable. This is not the first series where players being attacked are somehow injured or driven into a coma in real life. Now, I can understand the company wanting to keep that sort of thing quiet, but in one of the earlier .hack series, it was known that the game was the cause of the problem. I find it difficult to believe that if it started to happen again, people wouldn't connect the dots awfully quickly and refuse to play the game, no matter how popular it was. For that matter, I'm surprised the government and/or authorities wouldn't put a stop to the game. And the gamers themselves? How many people would play a game where they knew they might go into a coma if they played it? I'm thinking, not that many. Just look at how the problems with Pokemon causing epileptic attacks in kids made the news to see why this premise is so unrealistic.

This sense of unreality didn't let up, and made it hard for me to get into the book. Once I managed to quell the voice in my head screaming about how unrealistic the whole thing was, I found the book to be well-written and drawn. But the problems with the story is a big reason I found myself not liking it very much at all.

This book has big problems with realism that can't be explained away very well except by saying that everyone on the planet is an idiot, and I can't stretch my imagination that far without feeling severe mental strain. This could have been good, but the story problems ruin it. The author should get a dose of reality before he tries to come up with another .hack scenario.